Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Step 1. Don't have enough sales staff. Instruct all sales staff you do have to ignore women customers, even if they are clearly trying to examine a particular item over a space of ten minutes or more.

Step 2. Tell your staff to rebuff any and all requests for help from customers and say that they are just helping someone else but will be right back. Advise them not to come back.

Step 3.Password lock your laptops so that no one can actually try them out without help of above mentioned sales staff (which will of course be virtually impossible to get, see Steps 1 and 2).

Step 4. Make any signage relating to your goods virtually indecipherable to anyone without a degree in computers. This will make the customer totally reliant on your already unavailable sales staff for translation *evil cackle*

Step 5. If a customer manages to evade your preventative measures in regard to accessing the sales staff and the item in question, make sure that you do not have the item in stock. Encourage your sales staff to order in said item from another store, but issue a clear memo, in advance, that any requests from staff in Store A to send any items to Store B are actually to be interpreted by Store B as an instruction to sell the item to someone else as quickly as possible. To rub salt into the wound, get the staff in Store A to tell the customer that it will only be a day or two before the laptop arrives.

Step 6. When the customer has the gall to come in, because they were passing, a week after the item was supposed to arrive, and ask about it, make sure your staff are perplexed and flustered by the absence of said item. This will make the customer question their memory and only be able to persist if they have a receipt that clearly records their deposit.

Step 7. Once the customer realises that you have already sold their laptop to someone else they may give up. If they do you have won. If they do not you will have to carry out extreme measures by selling them another laptop which will turn out to be ex-service and have a key missing (preferably something like the Y key, which is relatively infrequently used and may break the spirit of the customer, causing them to give up and keep the defective laptop).

Step 8. If the customer is particularly hardy, and still wants a laptop after all this, they are a worthy adversary indeed. Give them a better laptop, for the same price, and apologise profusely. And pray that you never encounter their like again.

13 comments:

perhaps peterquoxote you would like to try to rephase that comment - why the nastiness, especially when this is span's blog and she has voiced concern recently over the nastiness that is creeping into comments on blogs.

A simple, "what was the name of the organisation you were dealing with?", would suffice.

I went into a computer parts shop the other day coz I'm looking at buying another whizzbang gadget for my other brain. I stood there for a good 15 minutes feeling exceptionally invisible. And then left the shop. I probably would've spent my money there but given that none of their staff would talk to me (and they had spare staff) I didn't bother. And I would name them but I can't remember what it was called. It was in Hamilton, that's about it.

I'm putting my money on it being Harvey Norman. Without a doubt the crappest computer buying experience I've ever had (of course, I finally gave up and went to the little shop around the corner and got a 10 times better deal from the owner-operater. which just goes to show what an idiot i was to try buying a computer from a chain store in the first place).

Or you can get what I got at a certain Australian owned electronics store when i wanted to buy a rather expensive piece of software: the guy behind having an intimate discussion about what a great fantastic guy (better than any other guy in the whole wide world) he was to his girlfriend on the phone...

Step 5.2If your staff do encounter someone who knows about computers and has a question that they need answered - bluff the answer.

Step 5.3If the customer in 5.2 insists on a correct answer, just shrug and give a non-committal answer like 'they all do, don't they'. Don't get a specification sheet or manaual as this will have a definitive answer.

Step 5.4Even when the customer tells you they're not interested in a different machine, keep trying to upsell them.

About Span

Span likes to think of herself as a mysterious interwab force for feminism and leftwingedness. However the truth is, as always, more mundane, what with blogging being the natural home of the frustrated and rant-inclined. Span is most certainly of their ilk. Sometimes she even talks about herself in the third person. We rest our case.

Sat. 21st Apr. 2007 - started this feature (hat tip to NZ Conservative), added to blogroll the following: Your Dirty Answer, the blonde canadian, Parrot on Policy, High Windows, and Short and Sweet Like Me